'Fargo' Season 4 Trailer Teases A Wild Crime War And An Even Wilder Cast

The films of the Coen brothers have always been flexible in tone and genre, so it's no surprise that FX's Fargo television series has followed suit. Noah Hawley's oddball continuation/expansion of the Oscar-winning film has shifted over the years, dabbling in dark drama, screwball comedy, grand tragedy, and violent action. The latest season takes us back to the 1950s and into the middle of a war between an Italian crime family and Black crime family...and the latest teaser trailer suggests there may be more straight-up comedy than you'd think.

The trailer is heavy on oddball tone and light on plot, so here's the official synopsis to fill in the gaps:

The fourth installment of Fargo is set in 1950 Kansas City, where two criminal syndicates fighting for a piece of the American dream have struck an uneasy peace. Chris Rock stars as Loy Cannon, the head of the African American crime family who trades sons with the head of the Italian mafia as part of tenuous truce.

While Chris Rock and Jason Schwartzman take on the heads of those competing crime families, the supporting cast is as stacked as the previous seasons: Timothy Olyphant, Jack Huston, Ben Whishaw, Jessie Buckley, Salvatore Esposito, Andrew Bird, Jeremie Harris, Gaetano Bruno, Anji White, Francesco Acquaroli, E'myri Crutchfield, Amber Midthunder, Uzo Aduba, and James Vincent Meredith all have parts to play.

Perhaps the goofy tone of this trailer shouldn't come as a surprise, as Hawley himself said he looked to the Coens' Raising Arizona (one of the duo's most cartoonish films) for inspiration. However, it also sounds like the comedy will smuggle a bitter pill to viewers. The showrunner explained:

"This year we're really looking at the kind of origins of the American capital crime, which is the exploitation of free and cheap labor. It's the fact that in order to create wealth, people were exploited, and their labor was exploited, and it took a long time for those people working to break their way into what we consider to be mainstream America. And some people are still trying. So I think that this story is very much about that, but in a character driven way, obviously. I never want to feel like the audience is being lectured to on any level, but I do think there's a process whereby whoever is on the up is making their money off the back of the person below them, and then there's always somebody below them. What's interesting is this battle between Chris' group and Jason's group, which is almost to climb over each other to get into what's considered mainstream society."

Fargo season 4 was originally supposed to premiere in April of this year, making it a prime Emmys contender. However, the COVID-19 pandemic shut down production with only eight of the planned 10 episodes finished. No new release date has been set (the trailer promises a cryptic "coming soon"), but FX hopes to have the season finished and ready to air before the end of 2020.